Sunless Roads
by Mockingtale
Summary: We cannot travel all roads. A series of small conversations you had once with the characters from the Sandman universe. The maybes, the whys, the little things and the path not taken.
1. I

**I : should you choose to stay**

I peeked through the door hinges, curious fingers slipping through gaps for better grip. The woman was beautiful and young, yet her youth looked weary; and her time looked past. His face was grave and solemn, yet very beautiful also, in the way that tombstones stand elegant in quiet cemeteries. They were both proud people— very guarded, and the man looked sorry. In fact, I think perhaps he had never looked more sorry in his life.

"I think I ought to apologise," he said. And the woman slapped him viciously, simmering rage boiling to the surface. The man looked ready to lose his temper as well, but something stopped him. I think, and I know, my nightgown slipping down by skinny shoulders, that it was guilt.

"I deserved it," he admitted. The woman said nothing, her dark skin and dark eyes glimmering like black crystals in the light. There was nothing to say. She had already forgiven him.

I think, perhaps, that was what love was.

Later, when I left, the both of them still talking, I would wander the corridors and hallways of this palace. It was ever-changing. Whenever I looked behind, I would find the path that trailed behind me significantly different from the path that I had taken in the first place. Maybe, I thought distantly, this was because you can only experience the path not taken, in dreams. The trail you gave a miss because you were too scared to know, the phone call you never answered, the date you missed, the yes to the question you answered no to.

I think she would have made a great Dream queen, I thought to myself idly. On my left, a man boiled his brother alive while a gargoyle watched. He squealed like a pig as the scalding water shot up his bones and melted his skin. He clawed at the cauldron and his nails fell by my feet. I picked them up and handed them over to the gargoyle, who nodded to me in gratitude.

I also think she made the right choice.

When I wandered a bit, past my teacher in her honey bee suit, I saw the mailman making love to the dog, my father chopping his arm in ten places then twenty places more; and then I went to the garden. Bamboo shot out of the ground as orchids wove their way around my feet. Lanterns swung to a non-existent music while a monster, a yokai I think, lazed in the background. It was very pretty. It seemed like a lovely oriental garden at first, but when I went closer, it encompassed the whole sea.

I think Moses died here.

I walked to the sand, the grains rising up and catching in the web between my toes. What a big sea, I thought. I must be dreaming. I sat down, fiddling absently with the loose threads of my nightgown. Sometimes, I wished they would catch around my neck and slice my throat open.

"Would you have liked her to say yes?" I asked him. He sat next to me, quiet and distant. I wasn't here. I was the rock on the edge of the world, and he was the traveller that owned the cosmos, clad in black casual. The Dream King pays no heed to the dreamer; they are visitors and owners of his world and so he watches over us.

"Yes," he answered me. He sounded tired. "Yes, I would have. Very much."

"I'm sorry."

"It is her choice. I must come to respect it as I should have so many aeons ago."

I nodded along, not really listening. The sea rushed up on my stone feet, carved streamlets between my stone fingers and wore down on my skin. The breeze blew, tasting of oranges and salt. Seagulls whistled. I was still dreaming. I smiled.

"Would you have liked her to say yes?"

He said nothing, pushing castles out of sand between his feet, poking holes. Soldiers hung precariously from tethered ropes above the air, realising that their fortress was not ground-bound. They yelled. Their enemies' invasion would not be successful, but if they could not leave and reach the ground, how could they get their supplies? They were going to starve. I saw a soldier weep at the realisation. He jumped and his creator merely scooped him from the ground and made his bones a part of the foundation.

"I don't know."

Ah it's true. It's true because as much as you can love someone, as willing as you are to die for them, you don't know what's going to happen afterwards. And you'll never know.

"Maybe she could have been your queen. Maybe you would have had another son, or a daughter. Maybe you wouldn't have tired of her in forever."

"Maybe."

You frowned at him. You looked at his grainy castle, and you reached over and fashioned a tall, glacial tower. The princess peaked out from her cage and shivered, the frost stabbing into her lungs.

"You need a dragon," you suggested, and so he made one. The dragon was successful. It ate a suitor.

Something nudged at your consciousness, and so you looked up. The sun was now sinking, launched by the circus canon over the moon and into the sea. You watched it drop past the ocean waves, like an angler fish's light glimmering in the deep. Well,you thought, you were in the Dreaming. Everything that had happened, could have happened, would have happen and would never happen was here. So—

"Maybe you can dream about it."

"I can't dream."

"Well," you said, not missing a beat. "If that's the case—" You stood up, brushing off sand grains and sea glass. It was time for you to wake up.

"Then you can move on."

And then you woke.

In the morning, you would slam the alarm shut and rush to the bathroom to prepare for school. You had a dream. You couldn't remember what it was.

And so the day went.


	2. II

**II: thursday's child**

It was noon in the Dreaming— or at least it tasted like it; cold cream with a tang of sky.

I was up on the rooftops, weaving barley wheat and petunias into nonsense. I took their pale pink petals and tasted them between my teeth, watching the ivory catch and infect, staining them white. As I rubbed my calloused fingers on the serrated edge of my incisors, a little of the pink bled into the micro patterns of my fingerprints– blood of the drowned creeping up from the mouth of the sea.

"Those look pretty enough," the Hippogriff said. I beamed up widely from where I sat next to his towering form, cloaked with an autumn of feathers; iridescent orange and honeyed-red. If you blinked thrice, forgot your tongue and forgot your form, he could be blue, or hydroxide, a shadowed cat or a tapestry of trees. Whatever you defined your eyes believed in. But because I was born in stories of Camelot and Greek, he was a Hippogriff, and because I was a wanderer lost, he let me sit on the gates.

I held up my tangle of barley and white petunias. "Would you like them to be roses?" I asked him, smiling. I was trying to be happy today. Normally I would not roam so close to the Palace, with their sharp crystal spires and pristine beauty. His palace was like a spiked jewel in the snow, swirling with flora and the old caress of precious, ancient things.

The Palace's master let me in occasionally, and we would carve out a hole in the floor and sit and ice fish, while we played cards. I knew he was busy though, and he had important things to attend to. Usually I stayed away and chatted with a delusional rapist, or watch my local pastor speak and preach, his own disabled son skulking in the doorway behind him– regrets congealing into skeletons. Yesterday, I attended a fox's wedding, and watched belatedly as the scorned wife of a daimyo dragged his corpse from its funeral procession. She made love to it furiously, her stinking, bloating body expelling gas with every thrust.

In all honesty, like you, I'm a vacant traveller. Each day I walk through his realm and feed it life, and I am given choice to listen or tell. He can sink me into a nightmare underground, lock me in the sulphurous pits of hell, or grant me bliss in the orgasm of existence. We wonder sometimes at his true identity, just as we nitpick at the faces we see in our waking lives. Who is he really? Lord tyrant, conqueror, saviour?

Dream is merely a function. I know this as I know my sleep. He is our clandestine lover behind closed eyes. To him however, we people come and go, like the angels in the frescoes of Michelangelo. We fade and breathe out, like twinkling stars in the cold sky.

Appreciated— then forgotten. We mortals are so rarely fortunate to be remembered down the centuries– unless you're a king or a brutal murderer.

But we can't all be kings.

Sometimes, Dream and I would simply sit down, and I'd ask him to talk. I don't think asking him to talk was the best comfort to him. Words are like the blood you've cut from your tongue, some inadequate transport from home to work, never direct, sometimes failing. Talking is like holding a half-pen— you've got a canvas all laid out, black ink. But not everyone's black is the same. Emotions are what connects us and yet makes us feel so utterly alone.

No, I don't think asking him to talk was ever a big help, but listening was. Trying to listen, to understand. If I didn't, I would apologise. He would never get mad, or never suddenly go quiet. He was different from his predecessor in that way.

Last month, on a warm morning, his older sister visited my mother. I know because I was downstairs listening to David Bowie records, and I was learning to read with my fingers, the braille notes cold and hard beneath my fingers.

Sickness had taken my eyes years before.

"What about my children?" I heard mother ask softly, her voice muffled above the piano's lilting keys. On a Monday, she would be upstairs, placing frail petunias in vases and exasperate about their dropping petals.

" _What, them? They're pretty old. You know they'll be fine."_

I stopped the music and frowned, looking up. The voice was not a voice. More like an instinct, a foreshadow, a promise. A woman's cool, cheerful smile and a kind hand to some unknown dark.

"I really can't stay, huh?"

" _Nope. Sorry."_

"Ah. I see…"

Regret, resignation, yet the relief of some burden placed down was signalled and followed by a huff. I felt my mother's warm chocolate chip, three-pack-a-day aura shift like a lunch gone cold. Suddenly at the piano, I realised how the heart can feel quite so heavy.

"So how does this go again?"

At that, my stomach surged up my throat, colliding with a wail that escaped the confines of my lips. I stood up, my chair toppling to the ground and scrambled at the chipped wallpaper to trip over and claw up the stairs to the bedroom. Flashes of fear thundered around my skull, but all I could feel was the 'no no no' that threatened to burst out of me and the numerous shrieks ramming into each other and boiling in my throat.

" _You take my hand. It's as simple as that."_

And then, on the second last step, my jaw smarting from being slammed against the floor, I heard her breathing stop.

I liked dreaming, these days when you've forgotten what things look like, you can simply just make them up.

When you were born, the first person you ever laid eyes on was the delivery nurse, or the midwife, or the person who pulled you out into the material world. You probably remember the colour of ferns, but never the exact shade of the first fern you ever saw. Did you ruminate on its green? Find the correct name?

My mother had almond eyes, and I remember their brown. She had stubby fingers, a long neck, and hair that changed colour with every season. But these days, I find myself wondering if her eyes were oaken or mahogany. And these days, I find myself forgetting the difference.

I remember stumbling across his other sister, in the secret room in my uncle's basement, where my cousin was kept– buried alive behind a false door. I remember peeking past the food flap and greeting colours, drifting butterfly goldfish that melted into green cheese ice cream flavour. There was a smell, of piss and morphine and spilled chicken soup in the carpeted floor.

Uncle was a hard man, who believed sickness was a madness that could be stamped out. When I got older, it was only at that cousin's funeral that I learned she died when she hit her head in an seizure. Epilepsy. Medication taken daily could have prevented her death— but then I'm forced to totter the line between 'what-ifs' and the inevitable.

Delirium provided comfort, or maybe it was the kind of comfort that served to only harm you more. She was young, and when you're young, you want to help— but sometimes you don't. Not really at least. Children pick at butterfly cocoons and hush each other in amazement when they see the dry coverings split. But then they pick up sticks and giggle and try to unfurl soggy wings in hopes of unveiling new wonder. As they stay for another hour, they only leave, upset, when an adult arrives and gently explains the plight of the creature they doomed.

On tired nights, I sometimes wonder at meaning, noiseless philosophical questions falling away from my mind like withered electrons. Pain could be felt sometimes; and I knew a single chubby index ringed with a hook had softly carved at my heart— like knife through pudding.

On these days, when I slept, I would ask Dream.

"You're the Prince of Stories."

"That is one of the many titles bequeathed to me, yes."

"Does being Prince of Stories mean you know all the endings?"

"Maybe. But I think not. Stories are all relative."

"'Stories are all relative'," I repeated, and then furrowed my brow. "Is that another way of saying 'it's complicated'?"

He had raised a brow in amusement. "Maybe. But I think not."

"Do you know how every story ends then? Do you know the last words printed on the last page of the last book?"

"No," Dream would say, his white lips smiling gently against ivory skin. Behind his eyes, Orion and Sagittarius wheeled, and I could feel his patience like a blanket, or a book.

"Those questions would be best suited for another, one more older. Lives pass and go so quickly, like migrating monarchs in winter. I was under the impression that the answer to your every question was 42."

I paused before considering my next words carefully. "Dream?"

"Yes?"

I hesitated. "Do you get sad?"

"I get sad sometimes when the situation calls for it."

"Do you ever get the kind of sad that makes you think you'll be sad forever? The kind that makes you look out the window differently, or see pictures in the dark that you once didn't see. The kind that makes you sit down for a long time and makes you feel as if you'll never be happy again?"

At that, Dream lifted a small white cocoon in the palms of his ivory hands. As I watched, a white butterfly seized and cracked its shell, wriggling out and unfurling buttery wings of powder snow.

It fluttered away, brushing over Dream's shoulder as it left.

"I did, once. A long time ago. 'Again' is relative. I like to think phases like those as a herald of needed change."

In the end, all their realms bled into each other, lace and glass entwined into a precipice. A game of peek-a-boo with velvet lips and a lone, ghastly eye peered between the thin slits framed by fingers. My father once told me that to see clearly, you needed to make it so you barely saw anything at all. The moon does not follow you as you breathe onto the glass window of a car. Shadows cast by winter lamps do not concave the path you walk.

That smile he sent you, from the fourth seat to the left. He, the one you've secretly crushed on for months. That smile will fade with that loose blouse thread, or the salt you accidentally put in your tea at four.

It will come and go, like the angels of Michelangelo. Like you, like life. Like time.

So if when on a Sunday, when you're leaning against the drywall and David Bowie's 'Life on Mars' is wailing in the background. When you close your eyes and suddenly your heart is being ripped out of your chest and scraped against the floor, when your lungs contract but you can't cry. When _he_ comes— or _she_ — sleek jet hair and lovely red mouth.

And asks if you would like your mother back.

Try to smile, be polite.

And learn to let go.

Their realms are your home, you visit each one— poke your head in each over your lifetime. Some stay in one longer than the others. Some stay forever. The Seven are your home, but make no mistake, they make their home in _you_.

Transient guests.

Do you remember the face of the first person you saw when you were born? Did you accept my words of the nurse, the nursemaid, the midwife, the mother? Did you simply accept what was said? Did you skim past those tiny details, taking so much for granted?

Are you sure you remember the exact shade of your first fern?

No, the first person we all saw was Death.

Can you remember?

The ankh that dangled above your face, your eyes alight in wonder as you made a fruitless grab for it. Her smile, her darkly-lined eyes. Her jet hair over her shoulders, her pale finger clasped in your chubby fist. Can you remember?

Our last lover. Our very last home.


End file.
